TRNT gives way to TTWA
I just realised I haven't written in a good long while! And that I'm in Ottawa, leeching wireless off of Alison's dining room airwaves. And that the show opens in 11 days - and that there are a few pages on my website whose content has been "Coming Soon" for, like, 3 months. Patience! It's a lot more work than I thought, setting up a site from scratch.
I could already tell by the end of that paragraph that blogging is restful for me and that I should do it more often. Not that I've been impossibly stressed, but there's been a lot going on of course. Of course! I'm working on my first multi-character show, my first actual play-play script. And my first 6-city tour (almost wrote 60-city. Heaven forbid. Where? Minsk? Utrecht? Carracas? Atlantis?).
So what's new? We're in Ottawa. We rehearsed in Toronto at Hub 14 right up until the exact entire end of May, then pretty much the moment I finished (ahem, minus some tweaking to be done when we return to Toronto) the massive 41-cue sound design opus we packed up our personal affects plus a home office and trucked Acky the Volvo sedan on up to Ottawa. By the way. Last year I developed a Fringe tradition of referring to tour-stop cities by four-letter code names. Did I mention this yet? Maybe last year's blog did. OTWA (or TTWA), TRNT (TDOT), WPEG, SKTN (pronounced "S'k'toon"), EDMO, VANC (COUV?). Now, we're here. I'm staying in my very own extremely empty house - the owners are on vacation for a length of time extending before and after my month-long visit - there is nothing upstairs but plaster and drywall and vague pencilled plans for fixtures. I'm sleeping on a pull-out couch in the curtainless back room, my head under a solarium window - it's actually very comfortable. I've set up a road office in the dining room - printer, laptop, press kit supplies, labels, wireless router...except that the ethernet hookup seems to have fled with the house's owners - which is why I'm at Alison's family home, not far down the street in fact.
Toronto! We rehearsed 60 hours in that fine little movement studio, culminating in a pre-preview for an audience of one who had already read the script. So many suprising things for me in this rehearsal period:
- that the perfect costume pants turned out to be the ones I was wearing all along
- that the best solution for storing small props on my body would come from a magic supplies store
- that the show needs to be performed barefoot
- that a script that was once 75 pages can become 27 and still need trimming and still say pretty much the same things but better (actually, I learned this with WOOL last year: specifically that a story is stronger when you don't have the emotional reaction for the audience, but let them have it for themselves...)
- that I can play 12 characters and keep them all straight!
- that I can fall off a ladder in a potentially horrible (but actually pretty much okay) accident because of a hand gesture.
- that I learn line changes very quickly if I write them in by hand, and much less quickly if I dictate them to Alison-cum-Toshiba.
Now we're looking forward to a preview for some Grade 10 drama students on Thursday, and rehearsals at various schools. We open on the 15th of June. TTWA may be the warmup festival for publicity, but I want the show to open with a bang - OTWAns deserve it! And plus, WPEG sends its reviews out to do sneaky early reviews, so if we want to take that city by storm...the real work happens now.
I need to spend some time with the smaller characters. Alone.
'til the next!
I could already tell by the end of that paragraph that blogging is restful for me and that I should do it more often. Not that I've been impossibly stressed, but there's been a lot going on of course. Of course! I'm working on my first multi-character show, my first actual play-play script. And my first 6-city tour (almost wrote 60-city. Heaven forbid. Where? Minsk? Utrecht? Carracas? Atlantis?).
So what's new? We're in Ottawa. We rehearsed in Toronto at Hub 14 right up until the exact entire end of May, then pretty much the moment I finished (ahem, minus some tweaking to be done when we return to Toronto) the massive 41-cue sound design opus we packed up our personal affects plus a home office and trucked Acky the Volvo sedan on up to Ottawa. By the way. Last year I developed a Fringe tradition of referring to tour-stop cities by four-letter code names. Did I mention this yet? Maybe last year's blog did. OTWA (or TTWA), TRNT (TDOT), WPEG, SKTN (pronounced "S'k'toon"), EDMO, VANC (COUV?). Now, we're here. I'm staying in my very own extremely empty house - the owners are on vacation for a length of time extending before and after my month-long visit - there is nothing upstairs but plaster and drywall and vague pencilled plans for fixtures. I'm sleeping on a pull-out couch in the curtainless back room, my head under a solarium window - it's actually very comfortable. I've set up a road office in the dining room - printer, laptop, press kit supplies, labels, wireless router...except that the ethernet hookup seems to have fled with the house's owners - which is why I'm at Alison's family home, not far down the street in fact.
Toronto! We rehearsed 60 hours in that fine little movement studio, culminating in a pre-preview for an audience of one who had already read the script. So many suprising things for me in this rehearsal period:
- that the perfect costume pants turned out to be the ones I was wearing all along
- that the best solution for storing small props on my body would come from a magic supplies store
- that the show needs to be performed barefoot
- that a script that was once 75 pages can become 27 and still need trimming and still say pretty much the same things but better (actually, I learned this with WOOL last year: specifically that a story is stronger when you don't have the emotional reaction for the audience, but let them have it for themselves...)
- that I can play 12 characters and keep them all straight!
- that I can fall off a ladder in a potentially horrible (but actually pretty much okay) accident because of a hand gesture.
- that I learn line changes very quickly if I write them in by hand, and much less quickly if I dictate them to Alison-cum-Toshiba.
Now we're looking forward to a preview for some Grade 10 drama students on Thursday, and rehearsals at various schools. We open on the 15th of June. TTWA may be the warmup festival for publicity, but I want the show to open with a bang - OTWAns deserve it! And plus, WPEG sends its reviews out to do sneaky early reviews, so if we want to take that city by storm...the real work happens now.
I need to spend some time with the smaller characters. Alone.
'til the next!
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